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Gakuen Alice 4 by Tachibana Higuchi: B+

May 24, 2009 by Michelle Smith

gakuen4 From the back cover:
Mikan’s daring rescue of Natsume earned her an upgrade to One-Star rank, with all attendant privileges. And just in time, too. For the School Festival is about to begin, and the Special Ability class is using every last trick they’ve got to create an exciting—and surprising—attraction!

Review:
There’s not as much darkness in this volume, and though I’m a fan of that aspect of the story, it’s nice to have a fun interlude like this one.

One of the things I really like about this series is how it’ll go into detail about things that could be boring, like specifics of Alice power capacities or ranking systems, but make them interesting (and not seem like afterthoughts). The same thing happens regarding the Special Ability class’ attraction for the school festival—there are actually a few chapters about the RPG they create and its rules and it’s still a lot of fun to read about.

Natsume and Mikan are thrust into each other’s company again in this volume and, though he’s a jerk to her, it seems like he might fancy her some. Their relationship reminds me of Hayama and Sana from Kodocha in some respects. In its initial setup, Kodocha features a cheerful, pig-tailed girl in conflict with the surly ringleader of class miscreants. She gets to know him (and his sorrows) better and no longer hates him, but he still avails himself of opportunities to cop a feel.

I’ve not talked about the art in this series much. At first, I thought it was too cluttered with too much screentone, but now it’s either balanced out or I’ve gotten used to it. There are occasional pages where the use of tone is excessive, including a weird tone for the hair of blond characters, but on the whole I haven’t any particular complaints.

Also, I continue to love Luca. I hope we’ll eventually find out why he’s ranked a Triple, since he says that he “didn’t get it because of [his] talent” like Hotaru. Is it merely the school’s way of thanking him for keeping Natsume reasonably content? That wouldn’t surprise me.

Gakuen Alice 3 by Tachibana Higuchi: B+

May 24, 2009 by Michelle Smith

gakuen3 From the back cover:
The school cultural festival is approaching, and the special guest is Reo, a former Alice student turned Hollywood superstar! But Reo is involved in some awfully shady dealings, and when his plans suddenly start to involve Natsume, it’s up to Mikan and Sumire to save the day!

Review:
I never thought I’d be giving a B+ to something featuring a school festival and a kidnapping perpetrated by a bishounen idol, but there you go. I guess I’m just a sucker for the combination of ominous facts about the Academy and warm, fuzzy friendship scenes between its students that this volume offers.

It helps that Higuchi uses these silly scaffoldings to reveal more about Natsume’s situation at the school. Being classified as a “dangerous” ability-type means that he’s prohibited from participating in the festival, and even as Mikan is orchestrating something that the “special” type can do to show the other students that they aren’t rejects, she’s aware of Natsume’s exclusion. Later, after she and snobby classmate Sumire have gotten themselves kidnapped while trying to save him, she overhears the kidnappers talking about Natsume’s tragic background and the real reason the dangerous class exists: to do the Academy’s dirty work.

My favorite chapter, though, is mostly fluffy. Mean Professor ~~Snape~~ Jinno denies Mikan a visit to ~~Hogsmeade~~ Central Town, an area on the Alice Academy grounds full of shops owned by Alice artisans, but manages to wrangle permission and then puts on a street performance to earn enough money to buy some candy. Put like that, it’s lame, but when she gives the leftovers of her candy to Narumi-sensei to give to her grandfather when he sees him, it means that she’s decided to trust him (despite the warnings from other students that no adult is trustworthy) when he says he’s going to contact her grandfather and let him know that Mikan is okay.

As we learn more about the Academy, Narumi-sensei’s urgings for Mikan to make friends, and how these friends will be her strongest allies at the school, take on a new meaning. We get a nice contrast between scenes where Mikan and Sumire finally seem to have become friends and scenes where Natsume is being urged to do his “duty,” suggesting that this band of kids might be called upon at some point to mount a rebellion. Interesting stuff, indeed!

Gakuen Alice 2 by Tachibana Higuchi: B

May 23, 2009 by Michelle Smith

gakuen2 From the back cover:
Young Mikan is the newest student at the mysterious and prestigious Alice Academy, where the most talented and powerful students in the country are united, but for what purpose…?

Mikan is officially admitted into Alice Academy, but things still aren’t exactly going smoothly. Natsume still bullies her, her class ranking couldn’t be lower, some of the teachers are outright hostile, and she has been forbidden to contact anyone outside of the school! Will she be able to find true friends at the academy?

Review:
Quite a lot happens in this volume and nearly all of it is interesting. Aside from getting more information about the organization of the school—including the importance of star rankings and ability-type classes (which are totally like Hogwarts’ Houses, by the way)—there are more indications that the adults at the Alice Academy are not to be trusted and that for Mikan to come there of her own free will might’ve been a huge mistake, particularly since she’s being watched because of the Alice of Nullification that she possesses.

Mikan is also improving in the likability department. She still has her annoying moments, but she’s at least trying to be more mature. Hotaru helps, too, chastising Mikan when she’s whining about not being able to see her grandfather and reminding her that everyone else there is enduring the same sort of isolation from their families.

My favorite characters are Natsume and Luca at this point, even though the former is almost always behaving violently. I love Luca because he’s conflicted between loyalty to his friend and his attraction to the more upbeat world-view that Mikan offers. Natsume is appealing because he’s been denied any chance at real camaraderie by being labelled “special” and “dangerous” by the school. What’s more, while everyone’s relaxing after a game of dodgeball that Mikan organized, Natsume is tapped by a professor to go out on an “urgent mission,” further denying him any of the simple joys of childhood.

So, yes, it’s getting better and darker, too. Definitely don’t stop with volume one if you’re interested in this series.

Gakuen Alice 1 by Tachibana Higuchi: B-

May 23, 2009 by Michelle Smith

gakuen1 From the back cover:
Young Mikan runs away to Tokyo following her best friend, Hotaru, who has been enrolled in an exclusive, secretive private school for geniuses. But it turns out that Alice Acdemy is a lot more than meets the eye. Whether it’s Hotaru’s gift for inventing gadgets, the cranky Natsume’s firecasting ability, or Professor Narumi’s control of human pheromones, everyone at the school has some sort of special talent. But what ability, if any, does Mikan possess? Mikan is going to have to rely on her courage and spunk if she’s going to stay in school, or even stay alive!

Review:
I watched a little bit of the Gakuen Alice anime several years ago, so was familiar with the general premise as well as the events that take place in this volume. I’m not sure why I didn’t go farther with the anime, but I think I might’ve had difficulty with some hurdles that also present themselves in the manga: unlikable characters and too many gags.

Our main character, Mikan, is spazzy and selfish. I might’ve liked her more to start with if Higuchi had resisted the temptation to draw many outlandish reaction gags as Mikan learns more about the Alice Academy and its peculiar occupants. In the second half of the book, while traversing a dangerous patch of woods on campus, Hotaru finally tells Mikan that she needs to stop behaving so childishly. Probably I was supposed to sympathize with the heroine there, but really all I could think was, “Thank you, Hotaru!” Thankfully, Mikan does get more tolerable around that point, as well.

Hotaru has some problems with likability at first, too. We are told that she agreed to go to Alice Academy in exchange for money that she then used to keep the school where she met Mikan financially afloat. She also was cold to Mikan on her last day in an attempt to cause Mikan to forget about her rather than nurture sad memories. That’s well and good, but the problem is that we are told these things and not shown them. It’s not until the second half of the volume that Hotaru actually exhibits some real warmth towards Mikan, even deigning to smile a little when Mikan’s Alice is finally revealed. So far, though, she does seem friendlier in the manga version.

Something that I didn’t pick up on very much in the anime is the hint of something more sinister going on at the school. Natsume is being caused agony by something, though whether it’s the dangerous nature of his powers or something else is not yet revealed, and both he and his friend Luca seem to sport mysterious scars. This is definitely the most intriguing aspect of the story right now.

Gakuen Alice is published in English by TOKYOPOP and seven volumes have been released so far. The series is still ongoing in Japan and eighteen collected volumes have been released as of March 2009.

Blood+ Adagio, Vol. 1

May 23, 2009 by Katherine Dacey

Forget what you know about the Russian Revolution. The real cause of the Romanov’s demise wasn’t growing unrest among the proletariat, or the high cost of World War I, or the famines of 1906 and 1911, but something far more sinister: vampires. At least, that’s the central thesis of Blood+ Adagio, a prequel to the popular anime/manga series about an immortal, vampire-slaying schoolgirl and her handsome, enigmatic handler. The first volume of Adagio transplants Saya and Hagi from the steamy jungles of present-day Okinawa and Vietnam — where they’ve battled US military forces and the myserious Cinq Flèches Group — to the chilly halls of Nicholas II’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg — where they discover a nest of Chiropterans as well as a host of schemers, sycophants, and crazy folk in the tsar’s orbit.

Russophiles will balk at the liberties that artist/author Kumiko Suekane has taken with historical fact, such as transforming Rasputin from a bearded monstrosity into a clean-shaven hottie and introducing Sergei Shupukin, a fictional general who supposedly rose from peasant stock to become Nicholas II’s most trusted military advisor. As preposterous as some of these decisions may seem, however, they work surprisingly well, creating a delirious atmosphere that captures the Romanov’s desperate, semi-debauched state in 1916. One could almost — almost — believe that vampires prowled the halls of the Winter Palace under Rasputin’s protection.

What doesn’t work so well is the actual story. Few characters receive a proper introduction; we’re simply thrown into the action and left to our own devices to decide which ones are central to the drama and which ones are peripheral, a process unnecessarily complicated by some unfunny comic business in the opening pages. More frustrating is how poorly the historical elements are incorporated into the storyline, as two rooted-in-fact subplots — the tsarevich’s hemophilia and Rasputin’s cult following — receive only cursory treatment, never rising beyond the level of period window dressing.

Frustrating as the story may be, Kumiko Suekane’s artwork is clean and stylish, capturing the opulence of the Romanov lifestyle through elaborate costumes, hairstyles, and personal affects. Her character designs closely resemble Chizu Hashii’s originals, though they’re a little softer and more sensuous than the angular figures from the Blood+ anime — a good thing, in my opinion, as the characters’ faces are less mask-like and more expressive. Suekane stages the fight scenes competently, if not imaginatively, relying heavily on speedlines and close-ups of contorted faces to convey the intensity of the violence, sometimes obscuring where, exactly, her characters are standing in relation to one another.

Readers unfamiliar with the Blood+ series may find Adagio a confusing place to begin their journey, as the author presumes her audience is well-versed in the characters’ elaborate histories. Long-time fans, however, will find this an entertaining, if unevenly executed, story that should satisfy their urge to see Saya and Hagi’s slow-simmering romance continued.

BLOOD+ ADAGIO, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY KUMIKO SUEKANE • DARK HORSE • 200 pp. • RATING: TEEN

Blood+ Adagio, Vol. 1

May 23, 2009 by Katherine Dacey

adagio1 Forget what you know about the Russian Revolution. The real cause of the Romanov’s demise wasn’t growing unrest among the proletariat, the intelligentsia, or the military; nor the high cost of World War I; nor the famines of 1906 and 1911, but something far more sinister: vampires. At least, that’s the central thesis of Blood+ Adagio, a prequel to the popular anime/manga series about an immortal, vampire-slaying schoolgirl and her handsome, enigmatic handler. The first volume of Adagio transplants Saya and Hagi from the steamy jungles of present-day Okinawa and Vietnam — where they’ve battled US military forces and the myserious Cinq Flèches Group — to the chilly halls of Nicholas II’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg — where they discover a nest of Chiropterans (a.k.a vampires who are more beast than bishie) as well as a host of schemers, sycophants, and crazy folk in the tsar’s orbit. Let the slayage begin!

…

A Distant Neighborhood 1 by Jiro Taniguchi: A

May 22, 2009 by Michelle Smith

distant-125 Forty-eight-year-old Hiroshi Nakahara is a businessman with a love of alcohol and little time for his family. One day, in 1998, as he is returning home (hungover) from a business trip to Kyoko, he accidentally boards the wrong train and ends up traveling to Kurayoshi, the town in which he grew up and which he hasn’t visited for many years. With some time to kill before the next train to Tokyo, he wanders around, checking out the building that used to be his family’s shop and paying a visit to his mother’s grave. As he’s asking his mother, “Were you happy?” something mysterious occurs and Hiroshi wakes to discover that he’s back in his fourteen-year-old body but with all of his adult knowledge and wisdom intact. Not only that, the family shop and neighborhood has returned to its previous condition, his deceased mother and grandmother are alive, and the date is still four months before his father’s sudden disappearance.

At first, Hiroshi acts merely as an observer, attending classes and making mental notes on the eventual fates of some of the friends he encounters there. In time, he begins to feel a zeal for learning and exercise that he’d not possessed the first time through his adolescence and relishes a feeling of liberation from his various adult responsibilities. His accomplishments in sports and academics attract the notice of Tomoko Nagase, the prettiest girl in his class, another difference from his past. Nagase has big dreams and it’s in deciding to help her that Hiroshi begins to take a more active part in this second chance he’s been given, resolving too to prevent his father’s disappearance.

Hiroshi doesn’t have an easy time passing as a fourteen-year-old. Aside from his drastic scholastic improvement, he’s singularly unimpressed by some things adolescent boys tend to be keen on (like nudie mags and cigarettes), occasionally lets slip details that he shouldn’t yet know, and demonstrates far more perceptiveness about the adults in his family than he originally did, as we can see in flashbacks of his oblivious past self. His emotional reaction to being scolded by his mother again is very touching and there’s also a particularly nice scene toward the end of the volume where Hiroshi is given the opportunity to ask his grandmother how his parents met, information he’d evidently never thought to inquire about before.

It also seems as if Hiroshi’s experiences reliving his past are going to help him become a better person in the future. When Nagase confesses her feelings for him, he accepts, but it’s abundantly clear that he sees her as a daughter and is still thinking only of how he might help her. After their first date, during which they see a movie involving Men Having Grand Adventures, he insists that women can do the same, and reassures her that a time will soon come when women can be “wonderfully independent.” This is in marked contrast to his treatment of his real daughters; in one of the odd moments where Hiroshi experiences a disembodied glimpse of what’s going on in 1998, his sees his wife and eldest daughter, Ayako, discussing a boyfriend he knows nothing about and declaring that Hiroshi will never consent to let Ayako move into an apartment. “Obviously! A single girl your age can’t go living alone!” he thinks.

Jiro Taniguchi’s art is never anything short of gorgeous, and A Distant Neighborhood is like his other works in that it offers plenty of beautiful landscapes, detailed illustrations of buildings, and a middle-aged protagonist (at least at first). Facial expressions can be a little stiff at times, but I felt that emotion was better conveyed here than in The Quest for the Missing Girl.

The overall feel of the story is initially similar to The Walking Man in that Hiroshi is merely taking in his surroundings without interacting much. Eventually, though, it becomes the most emotional work by Taniguchi that I’ve read. It’s also seriously engrossing; I could’ve read another 200 pages easily.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Review originally published at Manga Recon.

U Don’t Know Me

May 21, 2009 by MJ 7 Comments

U Don’t Know Me
By Rakun
Published by NETCOMICS

Buy This Book

“I realized that the reason the two of us couldn’t stand forever in the same place wasn’t just because I couldn’t keep up with his height–a height, by the way, which began outgrowing my own little by little.” – Prologue, U Don’t Know Me

Seyun and Yoojin have been close since childhood, raised like brothers by their parents who were best friends–so much so that when Seyun’s father made the decision to take on the debt left by his own father, Yoojin’s parents offered to take Seyun in as their own child to ease his burden. Though Seyun’s father refused the offer and moved his family to a cheaper neighborhood to tough it out, Seyun and Yoojin remained friends, despite the distance and their ever-shifting lives. …

Otomen, Vols. 1-2

May 19, 2009 by Katherine Dacey

To a casual observer, Asuka Masamune epitomizes masculinity. Not only is he the captain of the kendo team and a star student, he’s also tall, handsome, and quick to defend weaker students from bullies — the kind of stoic, principled guy that boys and girls admire. That macho exterior belies Asuka’s true nature as a sensitive young man with girly hobbies such as making elaborate bento boxes, sewing stuffed animals (the cuter, the better), and reading Love Chick, a shojo manga serialized in his favorite magazine, Hana to Mame (literally, “Flowers and Beans,” a pun on Hana to Yume, or “Flowers and Dreams”).

Asuka’s charade is threated by classmate Juta Tachibana, a tousle-haired player who discovers Asuka’s big secret: an unrequited crush on transfer student Ryo Miyakozuka. Ryo is yin to Asuka’s yang, a pretty young woman who can deliver a mean karate chop but can’t bake a cake or sew a button onto a blouse. They may seem like a match made in shojo heaven, but there’s a catch: Ryo disdains “girly” guys. Her initial impression of Asuka is favorable, but that encounter unleashes a torrent of emotion inside Asuka that makes it increasingly difficult for him to play the cool, macho customer. Juta pledges to help Asuka win Ryo — a gesture that initially seems out of character for such a transparent opportunist and womanizer. As we begin to learn more about Juta, however, we discover that he is, in fact, the manga-ka behind Love Chick (he uses the pseudonym “Jewel Tachibana”) and that Asuka is the inspiration for the series’ graceful heroine. Whether Juta empathizes with his subject, or is hoping to manipulate Asuka’s life for literary fodder, isn’t yet clear, though Juta embraces his matchmaking role with gusto.

The set-up is ripe with possibility, but I wasn’t entirely sold on Otomen after reading the first volume. Aya Kanno earned points for her sensitive portrayal of Asuka and gentle digs at shojo cliche, yet the story lacked the necessary edge to be a true satire. Her characters expressed disdain for various shojo conventions while engaged in stereotypical shojo behaviors — meeting on rooftops, exchanging bento boxes, visiting amusement parks. Kanno enlivened these stock scenarios with a generous helping of slapstick, but they never quite rose to the delirious, gender-bending heights of Your and My Secret or My Heavenly Hockey Club.

Volume two suffers from the same have-cake-and-eat-it-too problem, as Kanno trots out more subplots from the shojo playbook: a Christmas date, a surprise fiancee. As with the amusement park trip in volume one, Kanno pokes fun at these familiar scenarios by piling on the misunderstandings and the fist-fights. When Asuka meets his fiancee, for example, he’s initially enchanted by her girly clothing and Disney-fied living quarters. He sticks to his guns, however, and declares his love for Ryo, setting off a chain of events that culminates in a daring rescue by Ryo and Asuka. Yet aside from inverting the usual rescuer/rescuee roles, this scene feels like it could have been lifted from almost any wacky shojo romance; Kanno can’t quite bring herself to skewer this very creaky plot device even as she paints a ridiculous scene.

Otomen is at its best when tackling gender identity head-on. In volume two, for example, Kanno introduces a character named Yamato Ariake, an underclassman who suffers from the opposite problem as Asuka: his petite, pretty appearance leads many folks to assume he’s a girl, even though Yamato has conventionally masculine tastes. He “apprentices” himself to Asuka to learn how to be more manly, gushing about Asuka’s height, gait, and reserved demeanor with infatuated abandon. Yet Yamato expresses disgust when he discovers Asuka’s affinity for cute bento boxes and “girly” activities: how could someone as cool as Asuka be so feminine? On one level, the Yamato-Asuka relationship is a send-up of the “sempai” crush so prevalent in shojo manga; as Yamato catalogues Asuka’s best features, for example, Yamato’s saucer eyes sparkle with the intensity of a Moto Hagio character’s. On another level, however, Yamato’s plight helps underscore just how difficult it is to find a niche when your appearance or personality deviate from established gender norms.

Kanno drives the point home by showing us the degree to which Asuka’s thoughts and feelings reflect his feminine avocations. Using shojo manga tropes — flowery backgrounds, sparkling screentones, close-ups — she demonstrates that Love Chick has profoundly influenced the way in which Asuka fantasizes about Ryo, as he imagines an ideal Christmas Eve date that involves a tender exchange of words and a chaste kiss — hardly the stuff of harem comedies. She also uses these time-honored techniques to help us understand Asuka’s ambivalent feelings about his father, who abandoned the family to have a sex change operation. As we learn in volume one, his dad harbored a similar interest in girly things; his departure inspired Asuka’s mother to purge the cute and sparkly from Asuka’s life, lest he also turn out to be a woman in a man’s body. Though the flashbacks to Asuka’s childhood border on melodrama, the way in which they’re drawn gives them a poignancy and immediacy that mitigates against camp.

I’m not sure on which side of the drama/satire divide Otomen will settle, but I certainly plan to continue reading this odd, funny, and sometimes moving tribute to a character who’s man enough to excel at kendo and like shojo and stuffed animals.

Review copies provided by VIZ Media, LLC.

OTOMEN, VOLS. 1-2 • BY AYA KANNO • VIZ • RATING: TEEN

Otomen, Vols. 1-2

May 19, 2009 by Katherine Dacey

otomen1 To a casual observer, Asuka Masamune epitomizes masculinity. Not only is he the captain of the kendo team and a star student, he’s also tall, handsome, and quick to defend weaker students from bullies — the kind of stoic, principled guy that boys and girls admire. That macho exterior belies Asuka’s true nature as a sensitive young man with girly hobbies such as making elaborate bento boxes, sewing stuffed animals (the cuter, the better), and reading Love Chick, a shojo manga serialized in his favorite magazine, Hana to Mame (literally, “Flowers and Beans,” a pun on Hana to Yume, or “Flowers and Dreams”).

…